I asked myself if this is really the fraternity Rick wants to
join. I should be taking my son to look at college
campuses, not visiting veterans’ convalescent homes.
This trip was my last chance for Rick to see for himself what the
consequences could be of his plan before it was too late. I had
tried everything else to change his mind, short of ranting. I
wanted him to be objective and rational just like the arguments
my students learn to develop on their term papers:
establish the hypothesis, bring in diverse points of view,
establish the evidence as proof of the main point, and make a
conclusion. My conclusion, of course.

“Dad, I’ll go with you, but what’s the
point? I’ve already made up my mind. I’m
going in on the buddy system with Sean and Devin. I’m
not backing out now. If you think some old guys in a home
can talk me out of my decision, forget it. I know the
risks, but I’m young.”

“I wish you did know the risks. There are a lot of
hazards out there. Even before you get into actual combat.
Hell, you don’t even always buckle your seat belt in the
car!”

“Dad! I know, I’ve heard it: ‘take
care of the little things and the big things take care of
themselves’”.

The steep, curving drive up the hill to the veterans care
facility passed through groves of birch and alder trees,
interspersed with firs and pines. It had recently rained
and the road was still slick. The shifting clouds of the
spring sky opened up to clearings through which we had vistas of
small meadows surrounding rows and rows of small, white crosses;
there was a larger columbarium for the ashes of the departed
veterans.

You could see herds of deer and flocks of birds in the spaces
between the trees and the meadows. The air was fresh after the
rain and the birds were in full voice proclaiming the defeat of
winter’s dreariness. The scene reminded me of the
saying I’d learned as a young boy at the Ash Wednesday
rituals, “In media vitae, morte sumus. Never forget, in the
middle of life, we are in death.”

The well-kept, whitewashed buildings of the veterans’
home provided large covered porches with wheelchair ramps
accessible from the street below. It wasn’t at all as
I had expected it—had even wished for it to be. It
was certainly a contrast to the homes I had visited when my
mother and Jane’s father had broken their hips and couldn’t
walk any more or take care of themselves at home. There was
no fancy landscaping and pastel-colored walls and carpeted dining
areas with indirect lighting and room servers. I could detect
only the faintest suggestion of disinfectant; the walls had
recently been painted and though it was institutional, the pale
green color had an almost modern effect, and not the drab
cheerlessness I had expected and secretly hoped for. It was
spare and functional. Just like the military.

Though he quietly took in the scene, I could tell that Rick
was moved by what he saw. Standing in the hallway in his
high school letterman’s jacket with the awards from three
sports for four years, he offered a fresh contrast to the men
sitting or walking around in various states of mental and
physical disrepair. That letterman’s jacket, with its
insignias should have signaled me that he wanted the kind of
feeling a uniform could provide. I had come full circle to
reject uniforms right after I gave mine up. Uniformity in
clothing meant a singular form of thinking. Just like all the low
rider pants and

baseball cap uniforms the young men took on from the rap
singers and other celebrities.

“Attention A wing personnel. Proceed to dayroom 3
for mail call and medications. This message will be
repeated.”

The voice and the squawking public address system took me back
to my own experience of mail calls. From the relative slow
pace and quiet we experienced earlier

in the facility, Rick and I found ourselves suddenly in a
logjam of wheelchairs, walkers and men on crutches. All heading
for the day room. What I remembered of the uniform of the
day was no longer very uniform. Several men, mostly the
older ones, combined hospital pajama bottom whites with checkered
shirts and baseball caps. Among the younger ones, there was
a lot of facial hair and they wore their hair longer than the
traditional GI haircut. Most ignored us; a few smiled through
vacant eyes. They had gotten used to people coming in
recent weeks with news cameras and interview pads. The
country was about to launch another military action abroad and
the press liked to use the veterans hospitals and homes as
backdrops to the announcements by various administration
officials and military spokespeople.

“Dad, look at those guys,” he whispered.
“Some of them aren’t much older than I am. How
long have those guys been here?”

The walls in the common areas were decorated with head shots
of the current administration. They competed for space with
plaques and framed declarations of a grateful nation to the
sacrifices of its sons. You could chronicle the last 50
years of US military involvement in this facility. Citations
mentioned World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the first Gulf war,
Panama, and any number of smaller brushfires around the world the
US was called on to fight and extinguish. These men reminded me
of surplus airplanes stored in the dry air of the desert.
But unlike the airplanes, these warehoused men’s prospects
would never improve with an uptick in the economy.

I knew my son too well, and I was proud of his determination.
But I was also damned afraid for him. When I got back from
Vietnam to the rallies and demonstrations, I was convinced that
the next time it should be the children of those who didn’t
go the last time who should go. Not my kid. Fair is
fair.

It was a hard sell to get Rick to make this drive out of the
city on one of his last free weekends. “When you
asked me for my opinion, didn’t I try to be objective?
This is just another point of view.” I knew I could
be preachy, but that’s my trade. As a community college
history instructor, I could never turn it off. Always making the
rational argument.

When Rick came home from the career assembly with more than
the usual excitement about a vocation, I had perked up.
When I found out what it was about, some of my old feelings about
the military started percolating again. I had made it a point
never to discuss my own war experiences with him. Except in
general terms. His description of the Army recruiter’s
high tech power point and slide demonstration were almost
rhapsodic. Hadn’t I raised him to think clearly on
his own? Hadn’t his pacifist Mennonite grandparents
made their point of no war clear to him? They had lost that
battle with me, and my dad and I hadn’t spoken for years.
Maybe Rick had been won over by the recruiter’s razzle
dazzle. He and his staff parachuted onto the football field from
a small plane. A rifle platoon fire team had rappelled from
a helicopter. There had been smoke grenades and an assault
demonstration. It was one of his video games. Rick had even
invited the recruiter, all decked out with his medal-laden
uniform, to visit us at home.

“Dad, it’s not just about adventure. It’s
my duty to serve the country. People everywhere should have
freedom like we do. And yeah, sometimes you got to pull a
few bad weeds so the plants can grow.”

“Rick, I believed that once. A lot of guys did.
Can’t you learn from my experience?”

The receptionist pointed Rick and me down a long hall wide
enough to accommodate the two-way traffic of wheelchairs and
walkers. There was even a double yellow line down the
middle.

“If Sergeant Bigelow’s not in his room, he’ll
be in the common area.”

“Thanks, 115 B is the room number, if I’m not
mistaken.”

“He should be taking his medications now.”

Josiah had gained weight around the midsection. The new
lightweight metal prosthetics allowed him to walk with only a
slight limp and a cane. He had more than a little gray
hair. The pain lines in his face were new to me. Booze,
boredom and cigarettes had taken their toll on his once smooth,
glistening ebony face. He still held his commanding six
foot four frame stately, if not just a bit stooped now.
He could have stood inspection in his civilian tan slacks and
starched white shirt. Behind him, as he moved toward us, I
glimpsed a neatly organized room. Rick took to him immediately.

“I’ve heard a lot about you, sir.”

“No need to sir me, son. I used to work for a
living. Can I get you gentlemen something?

Sergeant First Class Josiah Bigelow had been a staff sergeant
back when we served together in Vietnam. I called Josiah to
recruit him to provide another perspective to that of the Army
recruiters.

“Listen, Lieutenant Davis, you can’t talk your
kind of sense into these kids. They been sittin’ in
classrooms all their natural born lives. They got so much
pent up energy to spend. And you want them to sit in
college for another four or five years, drinkin’ the rest
of their brain cells away and gettin’ it on with some sweet
thing? All they know is what they see in those adventure
movies. You know, the badass hero, huge muscles’
ripplin’, who blows into town and shoots up every known bad
guy, never even gets a scratch, and then climbs over the bodies
and leaves a smiling, happy town. Thinkin’ and logic’s
got nothing to do with it.”

“It’s just Bob now, Josiah, and you’re
right.”

I learned of Josiah’s wounds after he rotated back to
the states. At first, I visited him regularly at the
military hospital where they were putting him back together just
like he used to reassemble his M-14. I had left for my stateside
rotation and had turned the platoon over to my replacement, a
green young lieutenant. The sergeant himself had only a few
more weeks in the Viet Cong interdiction zone on the Cambodian
border when he stepped on a camouflaged bouncing Betty
anti-personnel mine and lost his leg. Josiah’s wife,
Sheila, had waited for him to return before she died of cancer.
He had been brought to this facility up on the crown of the hill
after several years of operations and physical therapy.
Baptist-raised Josiah had acquired a new dependency on
painkillers, pills and bourbon. For his physical wounds.
And for the ones in his head. His trip to this facility was
only supposed to be for the transition. But Josiah
Bigelow’s new problems kept him here indefinitely.

On the phone, Josiah had been happy to hear from me as his
former platoon leader and friend. He said he looked forward
to a visit.

“So you want to recruit me to talk your boy out of doin’
what you and I done. Well, I’ll talk to him, LT. For
you. But neither you nor I can deny who you were. And still
are deep down. All your boy wants is to be like his dad.”

Even though we were both civilians now, Josiah never dropped
the title or the respect that went with it. Thirty years of
habits didn’t die easily. We had seen a lot together and
there was earned respect both ways.

I agonized about using Josiah’s misfortune to “shock
and awe” Rick into giving up his plan to join. I
couldn’t sleep the night after he told me of his plan to
join the Army out of high school and defer college. We had
argued. But he was eighteen and no longer a minor. The only
other time I had felt this strongly about the military was when I
rejected my Mennonite parents’ pacifism and joined up
myself. I wanted acceptance; I wanted to belong. And
now I belong to a generation that carries pictures of the past in
their heads like some people carry baby pictures in their
wallets. I hoped the image of

Josiah’s physical and psychic wounds would offset that
recruiter’s promises of glory. Maybe Rick would see my
perspective now.

Josiah’s medical treatment, though basic and competent,
had been pretty bleak the first months after his return.
Others on his ward had not fared so well. The biggest stink
in the military hospitals was just not the unemptied bedpans and
the unchanged bandages. When the brass bands were silent
and the funding dried up, the vets were often forgotten.

“LT, you know I’ll talk to him. But I’ll do
it alone, one on one. And I’m not just goin’ to
tell him about the bad times. If he’s your boy, he’s
not stupid. He’ll know that if I stuck it out for
thirty years, it wasn’t all pain and suffering. Like
our friendship.”

“Fair enough, Sarge.”

After we filled our recyclable paper cups with a syrupy fluid
suggesting some obscure fruit from an urn in the hallway, Josiah
suggested a walk out on the grounds. Per our agreement, I
excused myself and went to the men’s room. At the
sink, waiting for the water to warm up, I tried to focus on the
image staring back at me. Just like Josiah, I had put on
weight. What hair was left was salt and pepper gray. Worry
lines and tense lips.

I sat in the car to read student essays, but I couldn’t
focus. Had I always been so controlling? This had been
Rick’s description of me. Sometimes you just can’t
save people from themselves. When I was young, my
discerning friends had told me to run to Canada. My mother
promised me money to flee the draft. My father promised to
make a case for me as a conscientious objector due to my
Mennonite upbringing. But as a student of history, I had been
concerned about the rise of Communism and its destruction of
democracy around the world. Something had to be worth
fighting for. Being a pacifist seemed such a cop out.

I had been in great shape from college sports, and had
actually volunteered for the draft. After basic training,
it had been easy to get into officer candidate school. Not
much later I was on the ground in hostile territory, scared as
hell and in charge of a platoon of men. Josiah had saved my ass
on more than one occasion. Would he do it now?

The dinging bell sounded when the car door opened and Rick
slid into the passenger seat of the older model Ford Taurus.

“You were there longer than I thought.”

“It went fine.”

“And…?”

“He said he was going to be straight with me. And
he was. In the final analysis, shit can happen to anyone,
anytime. Crossing a street, or in an earthquake, if it’s
your time, that’s it. He said you don’t always
know if the cause you’re fighting for is worth it.
Sometimes it’s not. You can’t always pick and
choose. He said it was all about the people you’re with in
the fight that counts. Like you and him. He said to say
goodbye to you. You can call him if you want.”

“That’s it? That’s all?” I
could feel the blood rushing to the scalp under my already
thinning hair.

“He also told me about you. I didn’t know
you had a Bronze Star. You did some awesome things.
Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

A light drizzle had made the roads slick after a long dry
spell. The early spring sun was setting in the southwest,
at eye level, dancing through the leaves of the trees; sometimes
there was shade, sometimes glare. The road down to the
highway had more hairpin turns than I remembered. I had to
fight the need to watch the road and also maintain eye contact
with my son. Sometimes the road got short shrift. My grip on the
steering wheel made my hands shake and the bile of fear and anger
welled up in my throat. When our eyes locked, I saw Rick’s
mother’s eyes, my set jaw and his bottom teeth pressing
against his upper lip. I also saw the determination that my
father must have seen in me.

“Dad, watch out. That deer!”

Somebody must have heard the impact of the car against the
tree I turned into to avoid the deer or the horn blasting when my
chest hit the wheel. The emergency vehicle’s siren
played counter to the car’s pulsating alarm horn. Red
and blue lights blended in and out of my dilated pupils. A
light rain danced off the trees and onto light refracting off
cracks in the windshield. I was fighting gravity as it
pulled my head down onto my chest while my eyes opened and
closed. In what seemed slow motion in a movie scene, I
turned to see that Rick’s body was splayed between the
blood-stained light brown dashboard and the seat. There
were glass splinters embedded in his face and neck; his seatbelt
hung limply next to the doorpost. He had forgotten the little
things.

My lips were moving but the sound of my own voice echoed only
in my head as I screamed over and over what I had said so many
times in a different place in the past. “Sergeant
Bigelow, get the men out.”

James Stark has lived in the Pacific Northwest for most of his life. He currently resides in Seattle with his family. He has a PhD in Germanic Studies from the University of Washington. After pursuing an academic career for several years, he recently completed a fiction writing program at the University of Washington. His short story fiction has appeared in Pulse Magazine as well as in spoiledink.com.

Copyright
2005, James Stark. This work is protected under the U.S.
copyright laws. It may not be reproduced, reprinted, reused, or
altered without the expressed written permission of the author.